We’ll, that was so Tuesday. Now, the NYT reports, the Obama Administration is walking back the secretary’s charges, with the help of nameless and faceless but vocal officials. It seems helicopters had been provided to Syria by Russia years ago and were being returned to Syria after having been sent to Russia for refurbishing. According to the Times, a helpful (or not) Defense Department official said that Hillary “put a little spin on it to put the Russians in a difficult position.”
The Times sums up the testimony of these eager but faceless accusers as follows: “Mrs. Clinton’s claim about the helicopters, administration officials said, is part of a calculated effort to raise the pressure on Russia to abandon President Bashar al-Assad, its main ally in the Middle East.” Why Mrs. Clinton thinks that saying things she knows aren’t true (for certainly that is the obvious though unstated implication of all this) constitutes effective diplomacy isn’t spelled out for us.
Hillary seems to be adjusting to the fact that she’ll never be president by trying create a legacy for herself in the Middle East, trying to bully the Iranians into not defending themselves and trying to bully the Russians into turning their back on their main ally in the Middle East. Believing themselves incapable of hypocrisy, liberals cannot help indulging in it.
Afterwords
In its continuing policy of not embarrassing important people unless other important people want it to, the Times quotes anonymous administration officials saying less than complimentary things about Hillary but won’t link to, or even list, the original Times article that reported Hillary’s charges, a story that ran all of three days ago. The London Review of Books has a fascinating review by Pankaj Mishra of Christopher de Bellaigue’s Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup, recounting the story of the 1953 coup that removed Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh from power and put Shah Reza Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. A covert propaganda effort by the British led the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to run stories comparing Mossadegh to, you guessed it, Hitler. Once the Shah was in power, the Times made no mention of the CIA’s role in the coup, even though it was well aware of what had happened. Why, oh why can’t we have a better press corps?
